Re: [O] [feature-request] make org-quote-csv-field customizable

[Tim Cross]

and from memory, you can also tell excel what the data type of each
column in a csv file is.

Nicolas Goaziou writes:

> Hello,
>
> Thomas von Dein <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> currently when exporting a table to CSV, fields are quoted automatically
>> if they contain a comma or a quote character. The regexp for this
>> determination is hard-coded in 'org-quote-csv-field.
>>
>> This is good for most use cases. However, if you want to import such a
>> CSV with MS Excel then some unquoted fields will be automatically
>> converted by Excel into another format.
>>
>> An example is a field containing 192.168.10.233. 'org-quote-csv-field
>> doesn't quote it, but Excel - for reasons I cannot fathom - considers
>> this a number (it doesn't do this when the last octet is below 233
>> though) and converts it to 19216810233 - which is wrong.
>>
>> I wrote the following code to circumvent this Excel bug:
>>
>> (defun tvd-org-quote-csv-field (s)
>>   "Quote every field and precede it with = to disable excel automatisms."
>>   (if (string-match "." s)
>>       (concat "=\"" (mapconcat 'identity
>>                                (split-string s "\"") "\"\"") "\"")
>>     s))
>>
>> (defun table-to-excel ()
>>   "export current org table to CSV format suitable for MS Excel."
>>   (interactive)
>>   ;; quote everything, map temporarily 'org-quote-csv-field
>>   ;; to my version
>>   (cl-letf (((symbol-function 'org-quote-csv-field)
>>              #'tvd-org-quote-csv-field))
>>            (org-table-export "/tmp/ex.csv" "orgtbl-to-csv")))
>>
>> To make this customizable, it would be good to have a variable which
>> contains the regex to determine what to quote. A parameter to
>> org-table-export would be an even better solution.
>
> It is already possible. When asked for a format for conversion, you can
> write something like:
>
>   orgtbl-to-csv :fmt tvd-org-quote-csv-field
>
>
> You can also define your own format:
>
> (defun my-orgtbl-to-Excel (table params)
>   "Convert the orgtbl-mode table to Excel.
> This does take care of the proper quoting of fields with comma or quotes."
>   (orgtbl-to-generic table
>                    (org-combine-plists '(:sep "," :fmt 
> tvd-org-quote-csv-field)
>                                        params)))
>
> and use it when prompted for a format in `org-table-export'.
>
> Regards,


-- 
Tim Cross